Just In Time Desktops (Instant Clones) on Nutanix

JIT desktops are supported on Nutanix. One current limitation of JIT is that it doesn’t support VAAI for NFS Hardware Clones. The great part for Nutanix customers is that were VAAI clones stop, shadow clones kicks into affect! So if you want to keep a lower amount of RAM for configured for the View Storage Accelerator your perfectly OK in doing that.

The Nutanix Distributed Filesystem has a feature called ‘Shadow Clones’ which allows for distributed caching of particular vDisks or VM data which is in a ‘multi-reader’ scenario. A great example of this is during a VDI deployment many ‘linked clones’ will be forwarding read requests to a central master or ‘Base VM’. In the case of VMware View this is called the replica disk and is read by all linked clones. This will also work in any scenario which may be a multi-reader scenario (eg. deployment servers, repositories, App Volumes, etc.)